Denver’s ‘Queen of the Night Life’ helped make cow town a roost for soiled doves

Posted By Joey Bunch On November 15, 2012 @ 4:27 pm In Cowgirls,History,Uncategorized | No Comments

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[Denver Post archive]Mattie Silks[2] led a wild, lucrative life in Denver’s early days by profiting off the wages of other women’s prostitution[3] and horse racing.

Mattie Silks left her name big and bold in the pioneer history of Colorado, but on a chilly Wednesday morning last week only frost lingered in the shadow of her lonesome, low headstone among the handsome monuments of family pride. The name on the marker says simply “Martha A. Ready, Died January 7, 1929,” as if that’s all she cared for anyone to know.

The staff at Fairmount Cemetery know her well. “We get lots of requests for that one,” said Ronda Gruel-Hott, the cemetery office manager.

A hundred years ago Mattie Silks was the famous queen of Denver’s debauchery, the operator of bordellos along Market Street, when the market was flesh that was rented by the hour with the gold of miners and the pay of cowboys. So accomplished was she as a madam, the style of boot she might have worn bears her name[4].

When she died at 83 years old, she was married to Handsome Jack Ready, but cemetery records show Martha, or Mattie, is buried next to the unmarked grave of Cortese D. Thomson, the gambler and con man who constantly did her wrong.

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[media-credit id=322 align=”alignleft” width=”300″] Mattie Silks, known as Martha Ready when she died, occupies a lonesome place in Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery next to the unmarked grave of her one-time husband and love of her life, Cortese Thomson.

Mattie had operated a brothel in Dodge City, Kans., before following the migration of gold and silver miners to Colorado in 1875, setting up a brothel in Georgetown. It was there she met Thomson, beginning a tumultuous courtship fit for Hollywood and laid out beautifully in an article in The Denver Post’s Empire magazine in 1951. (Follow the featured link a few blocks below.)

She moved her operation to Denver in 1876, soon feuding verbally and sometimes physically with her rivals, notably Jennie Rogers[6] and Kate Fulton. In 1881, Mattie and Kate wound up in the only known pistol duel between two women. But the fight was over love, not money. The stood a few feet apart on the west bank of the South Platte River near the spot where the Larimer Street viaduct would later cross. They both fired, and only Cort Thomson fell, via Mattie’s lousy aim. He recovered, because records show he and Mattie were married three years later. History makes little other mention of Kate Fulton, prompting speculation that tale never happened. There also appears about be doubt about the claim Mattie advertised her “soiled doves” by marching the new employees for sale.

Mattie Silks belongs to Denver’s folklore, but I wouldn’t call her a folk hero. Prostitution is a brutal, dehumanizing life, and it is now and was then. Silks lived off the degradation of young women she practically enslaved. God or fate dealt Mattie plenty of misery and heartbreak for her earthly riches.

Cort lived off Mattie’s money until he died in Wray, where Mattie owned a ranch, in 1900. Historians speculate the cause of death was years of abusing of alcohol and opium. Cort was 52. Mattie was 54. No one knows for sure why Mattie, a wealthy woman, did not buy him a headstone for the plot where she joined him 29 years later. The husband at the time of her death, rancher and gambler Handsome Jack Ready[7], died two years after Mattie, also in Wray, and he’s buried elsewhere in Fairmount Cemetery, also in an unmarked grave.

State and federal laws shut down blatant brothels[9], including Mattie’s, in 1915, when Mattie was 67 years old. She loved horses, a passion she developed when she was married to Thomson. “She was a prominent figure at the betting ring and paddock at Overland Park,” The Denver Post reported after he death. “She stuck to the horse and buggy mode of locomotion long after automobiles became the fad.”

Silks died two weeks after she fell and broke her hip in her home at 2835 Lawrence St. in Denver on Christmas Day. Stubborn, she was finally taken to Denver General Hospital on Jan. 7 and died that day.

Perhaps The Denver Post of 1929 tried to sugarcoat who she was and what she did out of respect for the dead, or spare the decency of its readers. The headline summed up the end of Mattie Silks: “One-Time Queen of Night Life Buried Without Prayer.”

The defacto obituary continued the veiled assault in the first two sentences. “With only a handful of friends present to pay tribute, funeral services for Mrs. Mattie Silks Ready, one-time figure in the city’s night life, were held Wednesday in the chapel of the Hoffman Mortuary. In deep contrast to the period of her life when she ruled the old bright-light district, there was no music, no crowds, not even a minister of the gospel to read a final sermon.”

Another newspaper story a few weeks later reported that her estate — “the remains of several fortunes she accumulated in her colorful life” — amounted to $6,500 in cash, $4,000 in property and $2,500 in jewelry.

Her heir was “an adopted daughter,” Theresa Thomson, in Selah, Wash., the alleged daughter from Cort’s earlier marriage. He had refused to take responsibility for the girl, so Mattie stepped in.

In a sad irony, business-minded, iron-willed women such as Mattie hit no glass ceilings in the Old West[11] until World War I. As Silks and other madams slugged it out in Denver. Pearl DeVere[12], a star prostitute who was said to command $250 a visit when miners earned $3, left Denver when the silver panic turned Denver’s millionaites to paupers, and set up her own shop in the gold camp at Cripple Creek. Her legendary house of ill repute was known as the Old Homestead on Myers Avenue. Today it serves as a museum. Unlike Mattie’s, her funeral was lavish and well-attended. She was just 38, red haired and fiery in 1897, when she accidentally overdosed on the morphine she used to sleep. She died in an $800 chiffon gown she put on for a party at her house the evening before.

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[media-credit id=322 align=”aligncenter” width=”495″] The “Mattie Silks House,” as it’s commonly called in Denver’s LoDo district, was not a home, but a brothel, and Jennie Rogers first opened the den of inequity that Silks bought om 1911, after Rogers’ death. Census records in 1910 listed it as a boarding house.

[10] Read the original article “The Scarlet Lady: Mattie Sils made over a half million dollars from the world’s oldest profession, but a good-for-nothing broke her heart” by Denver Post reporter Forbes Parkhill. Dated June 10, 1951.: http://blogs.denverpost.com/library/2012/11/15/mattie-silks-queen-denver-nightlife-ruled-kingdom-grace-force/mattiesilks/